Armed with this information, Sheila wrote to the Gibraltar Police enquiring about the Hope family. Luckily, a serving officer knew Elliott’s great grand-daughter’s husband and through another connection, Sheila began to correspond with a woman in Madrid. Slowly, snippets of information she was sharing with her contacts in Spain and Gibraltar started to fit together. However, none of them could work out where in

Spain Clara and her sister Ramona were born, only that it was near Valencia.

Sheila says: “In the end just one word gave us the clue to the final piece of the jigsaw. I mentioned that when Louisa and her mother moved to Ardmore Avenue they named their house Thara, supposed to be some kind of homecoming surprise. “One of my overseas contacts guessed straightaway that if Louisa didn’t speak Spanish the word Thara should probably have been spelt Zarra.

“There is a village by this name further inland from Valencia and my contacts visited it and found out that some of my ancestors came from Ayora, another village nearby. Records in the church there trace the family back to 1820.”

In 1865, when she was about 15 years old Clara, with her sister Ramona and their parents, fled Zarra during a cholera epidemic.

They were heading south and suffered a number of set-backs the worst being when their father, who at times had to leave the family to go off to look for work, one day did not return. The women continued on without him and finally settled in La Linea on the border with Gibraltar.

Eventually, Clara got a job as a governess at The Convent, the Governor’s residence in Gibraltar. It was here that she met her husband-to-be Alfred Dean, who was stationed there in the army.

He was born in 1847 and joined the Army Service Corps as a baker in 1870. He served in Gibraltar from 1873 to 1878, in South Africa from 1879 to 1880. He served in the Zulu campaign and was awarded a South African medal with a clasp.

After a period stationed in Dublin, he spent his final overseas posting in Egypt, from 1884 to 1890.

The last two years of his army career were at Aldershot, and in August 1891 he left the army and with his family moved to Guildford to become the landlord of the Two Brewers pub.

Alfred and Clara married at Chatham register office in Kent in 1878. They had six children. Alfred died in 1899, but Clara took over the running of the pub until 1933, and was a well-know person in the town. She could often be seen in the High Street doing her shopping and wearing her mantilla – the very distinctive traditional Spanish head-dress. She died in 1941 and is buried with her husband in the Mount Cemetery.

Elliot James Dean was their fourth child and was born in Cairo in January 1889. He joined the Northamptonshire Regiment and at the start of the First World War his battalion was stationed in Alexandria in Egypt.

Arriving back in Guildford, he had just 48 hours leave when his regiment left for France, arriving there on November 5, 1914, as part of the 4th Brigade of the 8th Division.

He did not have long to live as he died on November 20, 1914, of wounds that he had received.

He is buried in Estaires Cemetery, which is situated between St Omer and Armentiers.